Builder Profile: Ribbecke Guitars

Launching into what he calls his “California
touchy-feely thing” (his shops are located in
Healdsburg, California), Ribbecke begins to
explain a bit of his thought process. “My whole
acoustic paradigm is that guitars are energy
machines. They convert energy from one form to
another, but they’re not very efficient. When you
hear a couple of piano strings vibrating against
each other, they’re tuned to the same pitch, and
you hear the texture that resolves because they
are not able to stay perfectly in pitch with each
other. You hear this beating that goes on, and
we hear this as texture. I became aware that
the shape of a guitar top creates an acoustic
texture, and I understood very clearly that there
was some real-time parameter about this. But I
didn’t know how to deal with this concept that
a carved-up part of a soundboard that is much
more arched and much more stiff will actually
excite air at a much higher frequency and much
faster than something that’s flatter and more bass
compliant, like a steel-string guitar.”

Ribbecke’s dissatisfaction with archtop
guitars had to do with one of the things that
makes them do what they were designed to
do, which is cancel bass to create separation of
course—the ability to hear complex close tones.
“Like a minor 9,” says Ribbecke. “You can
hear it in an archtop guitar because the top
is not moving in the 1 kHz range—it’s much
more articulate. It’s much easier to hear complex
clusters of notes and chords. So you can
play great jazz chords with very close harmonic
tones. You can still hear each and every note
in the chord. Archtops have great separation
of course, but are nasal in their bass response
because they’re carved up. Bass has a tendency
to shake things in the 1 or 2 kHz range, which
is where most of our information is.”

The steel-string guitar, he continues, “is very
loud and very beautiful, but very hard to differentiate
when someone is strumming, because
the top is so much freer to move. It’s such a
more expansive and dynamic distance that it can
move. So it sort of overwhelms itself with information
in the 1 to 2 kHz range, and it becomes
very hard to differentiate every note in a chord.”

The Halfling Under a Microscope
Ribbecke’s Halfling is a beautiful hybrid with a
flat top on the bass side, an archtop on the treble
side, and an X-brace structure. Ribbecke explains
that it’s as if “you took a Martin and sawed it in
half, and glued the bass half to an archtop that’s
similarly bisected. You’d have the treble side of
the archtop and the bass side of the steel-string
guitar.” The net result on the Halfling is that the
bass side of the soundboard is more compliant
and rich—able to reproduce the big bass and
deeper, throatier sound—but the carved treble
side allows the instrument to have a great separation
of course and behave like an archtop.

“So the Halflings are really archtop guitars
with an enhanced and developed mid and bass
range—without phase cancellation.” Ribbecke
reasoned that very few things in nature are truly
symmetrical and began with the idea that “symmetry
was the hobgoblin, the opium for the
acoustic mind. But it really isn’t, both in nature
and in the way our ears hear. It takes a lot more
energy to make a bass note audible than it does
a treble note, and if you look at the curve of
human hearing, it’s also like that.”

Another asymmetrical appointment on the
Halfling is its bass-side, upper-bout soundhole,
which allows that side to be thinned more
without weakening it by punching a hole in the
middle. “It’s a nice aesthetic design,” Ribbecke
continues, “and I’m not the first guy to think
of it. I studied with Richard Snyder, who was
phenomenal and had his on the other side of
the soundboard, but I’ve stolen those ideas from
everybody who came before me. The concept of
the Halfling as a whole, as a piece of art, is to
free the bass side of the soundboard to be more
compliant and still have a instrument that’s truly
an archtop in structure and design.”

The first Halfling was commissioned by
Paul Szmanda, a player and collector of some
extraordinary guitars. “Paul called me one day
and he said, ‘What would you do if I gave
you a chance to just build something that you
think is going to be historically significant? No
fetters on this commission. Make something
you think will be a really great contribution
to the state of the art of the guitar.’ That must
have been 2002. That’s the one you’ll see all
over the place, with the quilted mahogany. It’s
on my website. It’s a pretty amazing instrument,
visually. I’d been waiting for probably
15 years for somebody to say, ‘Can you make
a modern embodiment of the Sound Bubble
concept that now works because you know a
lot more about what you’re doing than you did
when you were an idiot 22-year-old?’”

But the Halfling is more than an archtop
jazz guitar—it’s an instrument that can keep up
with players who play steel-string one minute,
then archtop, then electric guitar. “The modern
guitar players we have today, these guys have
studied. There’s so much information available
on the ’net. We have a new breed of guitar player
who plays standards, plays steel-string guitar,
plays all these different literatures. The quality
of the average guitar player is through the roof
right now, compared to what it was 30 years
ago. I don’t think this Halfling thing would have
worked out were it 15 years ago, but now I think
there’s a market for an instrument that will allow
somebody to do cross-literatures.”

The Halfling Bass is another of Ribbecke’s
innovations, and it was undertaken in collaboration
with bassist Bobby Vega. “He speaks
in a language that’s not like what we speak,”
says Ribbecke with a touch of awe. “He talks
about notes coming from here and here, and he
points to different places. I couldn’t make him
just another big bass that was supposed to be
a guitar, so he waited seven years for this thing
while I tried to figure out what to do to make
this really special for him. Bobby and I worked
very closely. He’s got an incredible bass—it’s
archival—and we took the same dimensions on
the Halfling bass, and we moved the tailpiece
all over the place. I’ve never known anybody
who can hear like him. I think I can hear pretty
well, but he hears things I can’t even begin to
hear. So we worked very closely on this bass
until, as he would say, it ‘fired right’—until it
had this dimension.”

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